The Serene Beauty of the Five-Foot Fury of Asbury Park

Guy just needed a job, and instead he became Danny DeVito

Danny DeVito lives high on a hill, on a street that could be called nondescript if there were such a street anywhere in Beverly Hills. I guess you could say it's an unpretentious street, in the context of a neighborhood where streaming caravans of tourists still pay forty dollars a head to be driven around to gawk at the tall shrubs and locked gates blocking any street view of the homes of the stars. Every few minutes, another one crawls by. One guide's talking about some motorcycle that once belonged to Elvis Presley—there's no motorcycle visible—and another points out the house where Brad and Jennifer lived when they were still together. Could be. I wouldn't bet on it.

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I'm early. Even with Google Maps, I tend to get lost. So I'm here a half hour early, and I seriously need to whizz. It would be thinkable, though foolish and risky—insane, in truth—to try to find some blind spot between the passenger's-side door of my rented Dodge and the flora to relieve myself. With the flow rate of a leaky faucet and these rubbernecking rubes inching by every few minutes, it's past all possibility. If worse comes to worst, at least I wore the black jeans.

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It doesn't help the situation that I'm more excited to meet Danny DeVito than you might think if you think of Danny DeVito merely as a sitcom icon. He is, of course, a sitcom cult colossus, beloved of two entirely separate generations of TV viewers. In the beginning, he starred on Taxi, whose network run lasted only five seasons, ending in 1983; thirty years later and counting, he's the elder loon in a clan of amoral cretins on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which has finished its ninth season on FXX. Then there's DeVito's work as a movie director, which spans the unerring brilliance of Hoffa and the noxious Death to Smoochy, an irresistible comic train wreck next to which Gigli looks like The Lady Eve, and his production company, Jersey Films, which has produced such cinematic gems as Pulp Fiction, Get Shorty, and Erin Brockovich. None of which is to sell—what's the word I'm looking for?—short DeVito's own work as an actor in movies as diverse as Tin Men and L. A. Confidential.

He is all of this, and all this somehow seems inexplicable to me. DeVito's sui generis, and it isn't just his height—five feet zero inches—or the lupine sneer that passes for his smile, or his want of neck and waist. The guy plays demonic, effortlessly cruel, relentlessly enraged, snake-sly, dark and demented, or lovably slack-jawed—but never, ever teddy bear. Despite his size—more likely because of it—this guy always plays big.

How big? Once upon a time, three long years after a smallish part in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, three years of sporadic one-off spots on TV series like Delvecchio, Starsky & Hutch, and Police Woman, a friendly casting director gives DeVito a nod to audition for the team of mavens creating Taxi—James L. Brooks, Ed. Weinberger, David Davis, Stan Daniels—men who'd already turned Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart into television legends. DeVito steps into the room, script in hand, and there they sit, on the couch, facing one empty chair in the center of the room, waiting for DeVito to read for what they've written as a minor character—the dispatcher who's mainly unseen, presumably sitting in his cage in the rear of the garage.

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DeVito doesn't hurry over to the chair. He steps into the room, stops en route, and looks the mavens over, one by one.

"One thing I wanna know before I start," DeVito says.

He tosses his script onto the coffee table in front of the sofa.

"Who wrote this shit?"

DeVito takes another step, into a frieze of silence, and the laughs explode in great gusts, and the underwritten dispatcher—Louie De Palma—is no minor character anymore. He's a malevolent, Hobbesian bastard, nasty, brutish, and short—the gleeful, preening linchpin of a great comic ensemble. Sixteen years after Taxi exits prime time, TV Guide ranks Louie as the greatest character in television history.

That big, brother. Hand to God, someday they'll name a New Jersey Turnpike rest area in honor of the guy. That honking big.

"When you walk into a room, there's already a set of circumstances," DeVito says when I ask him about his Taxi audition. "In the school I went to, they talked about the 'psychological room.' "

Womb?

"Room. R-O-O-M. You walk into any room, anyplace, there's a set of circumstances. As an actor, you want to walk in and make some kind of impression. I was fortunate about being remembered, because I have a certain physicality that sticks with you."

Your nose, right?

"Yeah." He knows that I'm joshing, I think. We're sitting at a patio table out back of the house, eating sandwiches. It's sunny but chilly. Windy. The first psychological room was a big kitchen—it's a huge old house, solid, nothing glitzy—where I said hello to Rhea Perlman, DeVito's wife, on my way to the second psychological room, a small john around the corner from the kitchen. Now the patio. The sandwiches are wrapped in foil. Chicken Dijon. Nice.

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"In the case of Taxi, it was fortunate because it was related to Louie—the character—and it was also related to the psychological room. Everything was working together, how they were intertwined. All the energies. I knew the script was great—it was a terrific pilot. When I walked into their office and threw the script on the coffee table and said, 'Who wrote this shit?' I was satisfying all those different elements. And they either had to be on it big time, or they were not going to be on it at all. They were on it big time. That's how I got the job."

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DeVito's quiet, matter-of-fact. He's working nights, eight shows a week, finishing a six-week Los Angeles run in Neil Simon's 1972 play, The Sunshine Boys. This year, he'll turn seventy. Not a lot of wattage to spare. He's heading to the theater in a couple hours.

"I have eight shows left. I love the show. I love doing it. With Neil Simon, why wouldn't you love it? This trip, I did 39 performances and maybe 7 or 8 previews, then the last trip, which was the London arm of it, I did 104 shows. It's nice to get out there. I've been having a good time. Looking forward to taking a little rest, but I'm going to miss it."

When the play opened in London—to high praise—DeVito hadn't acted onstage in forty years. No problem.

"If you have a good play, you have a good play. You can rely on it. When you're finding it, and then you have it and you try to explore it and try to do other things, you still can always go back to what Neil Simon gave you. I've been having a good time."

That's the thing you never think about with a guy like DeVito—not that there are many guys, or any guys like Danny DeVito. Hell, Mickey Fucking Rooney is five feet two inches tall. Rooney is Rodman next to DeVito, scalewise. That's the thing: This man is a giant. He wasn't born that way. That's why they call it acting.

The first thing you notice about DeVito is his physicality, which isn't about height at all, much less balls of fire. It's the four-day stubble, the silver-winged noggin, the soft blue shirt flowing untucked, the loose black pants—DeVito's is a serene beauty. Except for the duct tape stuck to one side of his heavy black-framed glasses.

Duct tape?

"I'll tell you exactly why: These are the glasses I wear in the play—Willie Clark's glasses."

DeVito's Willie is a bitter son of a bitch of a retired vaudeville comic living alone and nursing a long grudge against his old partner, Al Lewis, played by fellow Taxi alum Judd Hirsch.

The glasses are perfect.

"They're perfect, except for the fact that they're made by a designer. They've got this little metal inlay. The thing doesn't fit with the period—I taped it up so you can't see it from the audience. And it goes with the character. Willie's never going to get a new pair of glasses."

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Rhea Perlman walks by. She's a franchise player herself—nominated for ten Emmys, all for her work on Cheers, Perlman won four times and raised three kids, too.

"This is Rhea, by the way."

"Yeah," says Perlman. "We met. We met in the kitchen." Clearly unimpressed. Perhaps I was unintentionally curt in my rush to the water closet. She stops and looks at DeVito.

"What are you doing?" she asks. "Blabbing?"

Silence.

"Are you blabbing?"

Silence. Must be my turn.

I'm trying to write something that takes the entire DeVito oeuvre into consideration.

"Yeah," says DeVito.

"Are those your notes there, on that little card? That's it?" She's talking about my note card, four by six, on which I have printed topic reminders for myself. I put it on the table next to my recorder. Sometimes I forget things I need to ask. Lots and lots of things, printed very small. Cheat-sheet small.

"That's the whole interview," DeVito says. "It's right there."

"That's amazing," says Perlman, moving on. "You could put it on the head of a pin."

DeVito and Perlman have been together a long time. They've been married thirty-one years, and they were together for eleven years before that. They've been through some shit, including a public five-month separation last year. Maybe it's what Perlman meant by "blabbing"; I don't know. Rude as it always feels, socially speaking, to show up on a blind date with a recording device, I prefer not to ask other folks, even celebrities, about their marriages. Not outright, anyway.

I married an Irish girl twenty years ago, I tell DeVito. It's a volatile mix, Jewish and Irish. It's a very American thing when the tribes intermingle. Not unlike when a DeVito marries a Perlman. A rich stew.

"Yeah," says DeVito. "Oh, yeah."

Silence.

"Rich stew is good."

DeVito ain't saying one more word about it, and I ain't asking. It's rare and kind when the talent welcomes you and your recording device into the family home. Plus, sandwiches.

If you wish to see Danny DeVito's shining ass, I commend to you It's Always Sunny's 2010 Christmas episode, during which "Frank Reynolds" births himself through a slit in a couch and into a yuletide party, wearing nothing but a layer of grease and a genital sac.

Never heard of such a thing. Like a pouch?

"The couch?"

Pouch. P-O-U-C-H.

"Ooooh. Well, the idea was that you had to wear—I mean, it's not that I didn't wanna wear it. I didn't realize you had to wear it, but that's part of the rules—I did have to wear like a sock kind of thing over my genitals. They had some curtains set up, because I had no clothes on. They have you really greasy, because it's supposed to be really sweaty in the couch. And I get in there, and there was room for take two, but the first one was pretty damn good. I mean, just breaking through the couch like a halibut.

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"What you don't think of is that it's a party and there's gonna be sixty other background actors there, and when you walk in, you go, 'Holy shitballs!' when you see everybody there. But it was cool. This season I'm slimed—I shaved all my hair off my body."

Whoa.

"Yeah. It's the germaphobic show."

You may hold the current record for the oldest actor to go nude.

"I don't know. It depends. I'm probably at the legal limit now."

Given Sunny's prism of thematic focus—incest, pedophilia, raging drug addictions—and FX's spot on the UHF spectrum of the cable dial, its first season drew few viewers. The creators asked DeVito to come aboard and help save the show in year two. DeVito didn't get much encouragement to say yes.

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"People said, 'Don't do this,' but you have to go with what's happening at the moment and how you feel about it. I felt it was either going to have one season and it was going to be a lot of fun, or it was going to be tough and I don't have to do it anymore."

Turned out swell. Sunny starts filming its tenth season in April, and DeVito's still having a ball.

"They let me do anything I want. I love the fact that I get to hang around with those guys. I go to the bar, hang around, listen to all the bullshit. They're funny. We have a good time. It's good. It's like a Jersey thing, in a way."

DeVito's pure Jersey. He grew up in Asbury Park, on the Jersey Shore, during the 1950s, when hundreds of thousands of summer celebrants from New York City and Philly would swell the town to bursting. It was middle-class blue-collar, and like plenty of other shore towns, it had an underbelly; it was hard-nosed, pugnacious, urban at its core despite the summertime frolicking.

"There were a lot of things you could have done that were really scary if you were not totally terrified of winding up in a four-by-six cell—which I was. There were people in my group who wound up in jail. People who did things that were over the line in the way of causing bodily harm to other folks. There were a lot of drugs. There were people who wound up getting hooked on heroin."

His parents sent him to board at a prep school in the upper-crust suburb of Summit, New Jersey, fifty miles north and inland. He was the baby by more than a decade to two sisters, and as the only boy—the DeVitos had suffered the loss of two children, including a son, years before Danny came along—he was their prince. His father, Daniel Sr., preferred paying tuition to bail money.

"My father was a good man," DeVito says. "He supported his family. He always worked hard. He had a candy store, a luncheonette kind of thing, when I was born. Then he had a pool hall. That didn't really do very well. It was small—five tables—and couldn't really compete. But he loved to play pool."

Asbury Park, candy store, pool hall: By any chance did the old man also book bets on the side?

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"Oh, yeah. He was in the bookmaking arts. He also had a dry-cleaning shop at one time. And he also had this little dairy place—you drive in, get fresh eggs—a farmer's market kind of thing, but drive-through. 'From our farm to you.' "

That was the slogan?

"Yeah." He laughs. "Never had a farm."

What was the name of his pool hall?

"The Crown Billiard Academy. Five Brunswick tables."

Nice.

"Really nice. One of the classic experiences I had with my father was we drove from Asbury to see a guy named Mr. Blatt. Mr. Blatt had pool tables—probably had other sports equipment, too. I don't know. All I know is we drove up to New York, I think—November, December—in one of his Oldsmobiles. He always had an Oldsmobile. It was like paradise for a kid going into this place, and he ordered five slate-top four-and-a-half-by-nine tables, which fit—just fit—in the little store he rented. And he picked out the felt, he picked out the balls, the cue balls, the chalk, the counters for the straight pool counters, pill bottles for pill pool. Picked all this stuff out. I was twelve, maybe."

That's a big deal for a boy that age.

"Yeah, a real big deal. And on the way home, it started snowing. One of the biggest blizzards that we ever had. And we were stuck without chains, on the way back to the shore, in the middle of it. No cell phones—you're at the mercy of humanity. And people stopped. Somebody stopped, and they had an extra set of chains and fixed my father up. He never was slow with the duke, my father"—an old-school nod to the timeless practice of greasing the right palm in return for a solid—"so it worked out good."

DeVito had no interest in college. He came back to Asbury Park after high school, got a job cutting grass, and hung out. One of his sisters had her own beauty parlor up and running, so DeVito became a beautician. Then his sister wanted him to become a cosmetologist—her beauty shop needed one—so he enrolled in a night class on makeup at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York City.

"That was kind of an easy in, and it was a good excuse to get out of Asbury—just to take a drive up a few times a week, two or three classes a week. I was still working at my sister's joint, and then I got more interested in other stuff—scene study, the intentions of the author—two or three classes a week. I tried it out. I got up in front of people. I had a good feeling about it. I remember the first time I said to my parents I was going to be an actor. They said, 'How you gonna do that?' I said, 'I don't know. I'm going to this school that I found.' My family was very cool about it all. They weren't surprised I was trying new things, because even the beauty parlor was just my sister's whim. I had nothing to do.

"So I went for that, and that turned out to be good, because that led to this."

But you couldn't have known that then. It all could've turned out much different. Much.

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"That's the way it is in life, you know? Starting out, you can't think of that. What you have to dwell on, the toughest thing, is just jumping off that ledge into the abyss. There's so many daunting things when you're starting out—whether you're a writer or an actor or a carpenter doesn't matter. You're just trying to find the feel of the wood.

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"Starting out, it's such a seemingly insurmountable task. You have to find the fun in it. There's a line in the play I'm doing where Al Lewis says to Willie Clark, 'You know what your trouble was, Willie? You always took the jokes too seriously. They were just jokes. We did comedy for forty-three years and you—you didn't enjoy it once.' And I say, 'If I was there to enjoy it, I'd buy a ticket.'

"In my case, I always enjoy it."

You could see and feel and share that joy watching DeVito onstage at the Ahmanson Theatre, part of an arts complex close by where the 110 and the 101 intersect in Los Angeles proper—as if there were such a thing. It's a fine joint, a two-thousand-seat house with a proud history, including six world premieres of Simon plays and bright, well-tended restrooms.

DeVito's up there, center stage, in pajamas and a robe, living in bitter decrepitude—Willie, a forgotten comic legend whose career was buried alive when vaudeville died and his longtime partner retired. Hirsch plays the partner, Al. They haven't spoken in years, and Willie's volcanic rage at Al for quitting on him—by doing so, he was killing the act and Willie's career, too—has only mounted over the years. Simon's writing is at a peak, and the story meant he could pay tribute to a generation and a genre that formed him. He based The Sunshine Boys on Smith & Dale, a real-life duo who worked together for more than seventy years. They're buried in the same cemetery plot and share a headstone etched with the name of their act, and when Joe Smith (born Sultzer) died, the words BOOKED SOLID were added.

Simon's duo is permanently estranged. And it wasn't love that fed their professional marriage, but familiarity and contempt. DeVito's is the starring role, and Willie's fury rules the play, boiling over at its climax into a—there's no such thing as a Neil Simon spoiler—heart attack. Willie lives on, but there is no happy ending to their reunion, only the insistence that misery loves comedy enough to keep cracking wise even as death's jaws are opening wide.

DeVito and Hirsch do great work up there. Afterward, in his dressing room, DeVito's still pumped. There are maybe a dozen folks sitting and standing—including one old gent who's giving DeVito some gentle shit about a credit that wasn't listed in DeVito's bio in the Ahmanson playbill—and they clearly go back with him, all the way to New Jersey, a subject of mockery in Simon's play.

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A woman asks DeVito if the London production had to change any of Simon's New Jersey barbs to some other UK target.

"Never," DeVito tells her. "See the yellow script there behind you?"

It's the Samuel French copy of The Sunshine Boys, the one DeVito has been using for two years now, dog-eared and fat with his notes.

"We do everything, and we keep everything that's in the script—from the ellipses to the full stops to the end—every single thing you do is all in there. We translate it in a way very religious to his work. It's the play. It's such a good play. I don't think they missed any references. New Jersey's always funny. Doesn't matter if the audiences are different. It's a funny state."

His dressing room is like a good-sized dorm room. A nice-sized futon, bathroom, shower. Music and movie posters on the walls. The works.

"It's so much fun." He's still talking about doing the play. "You're surfing together. It's so much fun."

His smile shrinks the room and says it all. Almost.

"I'm high as a kite. I just keep going. I just keep talking. Until Sunday night. It's my last Tuesday. I'm starting to get sad. I like doing it. It'd be nice to do it in a smaller theater. I tried to get them to do a midnight show at a cabaret."

"You could do that," one man says.

"Or you could do it at Hollywood Forever."

It's a good line, and Hollywood Forever is the perfect room for this particular play, an old boneyard on Santa Monica Boulevard, eternal host of such long-banked showbiz flames as the Ritz Brothers, Mel Blanc, and Bugsy Siegel, plus two Ramones—though not Joey—and Darla from the Little Rascals. All of them BOOKED SOLID.

I find out next afternoon—we're sitting at another table, this one out back of the arts-center annex building, where there's a picnic area, a patch of green that turns out to be artificial turf—that the old gent ribbing DeVito after the play was Kirk fucking Douglas. DeVito's finishing up a small bag of large chips, which I decline to share despite his kind offer.

"How about Kirk last night? Holy shit! That was weird, right?"

The Scalawag guy?

"Yeah. Kirk Douglas. That was Kirk Douglas! That guy! The old guy sittin' in the chair. That was Kirk! And Anne. Kirk Douglas!"

Fuck me.

"The first thing he said to me was 'Hi, Danny. I gotta talk to you about something,' and he had this program rolled up in his hand from the show. I said, 'I know exactly what you're gonna say. I didn't put Scalawag in the program.' He said, 'Right!' He directed it—around 1970, in Yugoslavia—first time I ever ate a sea urchin out of the ocean."

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Was it good? The urchin, I mean, not the movie.

"Uni. That's what they call it now if you go to a Japanese restaurant. Yeah, that was Kirk Douglas right there in front of you. What a trip! It was nice to see him. I hadn't seen him in a while."

DeVito's friendship with Michael Douglas, Kirk's son, goes back almost fifty years; it began when they met doing summer stock. That helped when they cast Cuckoo's Nest; Kirk had owned the rights to Ken Kesey's novel for a long time, and DeVito had played Martini in the off-Broadway production in 1972—the same role he played in the movie, three years later.

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Meanwhile, how in the name of Rex Reed did I manage to miss shaking hands with Spartacus?

"Yeah, he was right there in front of you. You walked right by him. Ninety-something years old, out watching a play. He really dug it."

Before I forget, I gotta ask one for the wife: What was it like working with Andy Kaufman for five years? She remembers playing Parcheesi with him one night years ago, back in Philly, and that he was an absolute prince of a guy. Very sweet. Very real.

"We had a great experience. We had a good time. Andy was like—his whole performance-art thing was huge, very, very important to him. And part of the performance art is how much it means to him, which allows you to participate because you like him so much. You want him to be happy."

Did it ever get weird? Like with the Tony Clifton stuff.

"Once you go through that door, once you step into that room, you accept it all. It was a hell of an experience. I wish he was around now so I could call him up and tell him what I think. But he ain't."

You think you'll direct another movie?

"It's a consuming kind of thing, but if I find something that I really feel invested in, in my head and my heart, I could do that. You just have to pick your spots. I'm saying that in terms of tick-tock, tick-tock, one second closer to the grave."

Another sunny, windy, coldish day. Tonight DeVito plays Willie again while I wing home to New Jersey. Time to hit the head. Postage-stamp washroom, but on my way out, I have to step aside to let Brian Dennehy get by on his way in.

Was it Dennehy? After the Kirk Douglas debacle, I can't trust myself, so I ask DeVito, and sure enough, it was Dennehy, rehearsing a play that opens late next month.

We head back to the dressing room.

"I like to come to work early, take a nap. I eat around five o'clock, usually pasta. I carb up and then get ready to go out on that stage."

He gets cheers in the crosswalk, this guy. Twice he slows down to swap a few words of greeting with a fan, but never does he stop. When we get back to the theater, he leads me onto the stage. We prowl the dark, dead set like ghosts.

"It's got a life you can feel. My TV, my chair, all of my stuff. It's really cool. When you have something like this, you get to play around with it. It's nice. See out there?"

An infinity of empty seats. Nothing moves or makes a sound, but there's a tingle that feels like you're standing on a skyscraper. You're in danger primal, exposed to overpowering elements, and you're just standing there.

To live up here when the seats are full and the lights are on—to walk through that door big enough to own all of it—that must feel like one hell of a rush.

"Big time. The curtains are right here. The chair is here. You feel the energy of two thousand people. It's wild."

The man's a beast. It figures that if you're born to top out at five feet, you glean early in life that the world's going to define you by that one fact, no matter who you are or what you do. Which left it entirely up to Danny DeVito to decide for himself just how large he wanted to be. He went big, DeVito. Big.

CURRICULUM DEVITO: THE HAPPIEST UNHAPPY MAN IN THE BUSINESS.

1. Studying to be a cosmetologist, he became an actor by accident. Parlayed small parts into One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, followed by his defining role (2) as the sawed-off dyspeptic everyman, Louie De Palma, on Taxi.3. Followed by more movies; here, with the terrifying Anne Ramsey in Throw Momma from the Train.4. With wife Rhea Perlman, the female DeVito. 5. Topping Burgess Meredith's Penguin by a mile in Batman Returns. 6. With Batman costars Michael Keaton and Michelle Pfeiffer. 7.Twins, with Arnold. 8. Back to TV, on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.